THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: RECONSTRUCTION; U.N. Team Arrives in Iraq To Study Plans For Elections

A team of experts from the United Nations arrived here on Saturday to try to assess the feasibility of holding nationwide elections in the near future, the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, said in a statement.

The team is expected to try to break the deadlock between a senior Iraqi religious leader and American administrators over direct elections. The Bush administration wants to hand sovereignty back to the Iraqi people by June 30, and had planned to have a system of nationwide caucuses select a national assembly.

But Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leader of the country's 20 million Shiite Muslims, is insisting on direct elections instead. Ayatollah Sistani has refused to meet with American officials, but he has indicated that he would meet with the United Nations team and accept its decision.

American administrators say that elections are not possible on such short notice.

The American plan has led to large-scale protests, which appear to have been called by Shiite leaders as a way of demonstrating their power.

Shiite Muslims constitute about 60 percent of Iraq's population but were long excluded from power by the former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. Ayatollah Sistani and other Shiite leaders have expressed an eagerness to allow their people to demonstrate their power at the polls.

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The arrival of the electoral experts here marked the return of the United Nations to this country after its departure last August, when a car bomb struck its Baghdad headquarters and killed more than 20 people.

The Iraqi Governing Council, the American-appointed provisional government, welcomed the arrival of the team on Saturday but said it would feel free to reject its findings.

''We are glad the United Nations replied, but we are not bound by the conclusions that they will reach,'' said Mohsen Abdul Hameed, the current president of the Governing Council.

American officials said Saturday that they welcomed the United Nations to the country and emphasized that they would not interfere with the group's work.

''We would be open to refinements, elaborations and clarifications of the process,'' said Dan Senor, a spokesman for the American administration here. But he also said American officials would only go so far.

Also in Baghdad, The Associated Press reported Saturday that American soldiers had found seven pounds of cyanide in a house believed to be linked to an associate of Al Qaeda.

Citing an unidentified American official, the report said officials suspected the cyanide was being prepared for an attack on American forces.

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A version of this article appears in print on February 8, 2004, on Page 1001011 of the National edition with the headline: THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: RECONSTRUCTION; U.N. Team Arrives in Iraq To Study Plans For Elections. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe